In spare time, 3 guys in 3 days make a “Affordable” Care Act website that actually works

Even as President Obama has issued a constant refrain of how upset he is that his Obamacare website doesn’t work and promises that he’s on top of the fix, three 20-year-old website designers in San Francisco made a working Obamacare website using Healthcare.gov’s own code. They did it in only three days.
The three web developers who created the site, HealthSherpa.com, programmed it to do much of what Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website, is supposed to do.
The enterprising young men whipped up their version of Obamacare in just days working in their off time.

[…]

No, this doesn’t seem to be a joke.

The JOKE is the “AFFORDABLE” Care Act.

In spare time, 3 guys in 3 days make a “Affordable” Care Act website that actually works

A squadron of chimps could have done better than HHS on this “rollout”.

I am a total cynic, but, I believe Obamacare was never intended to succeed, hence it’s laughable implementation.
With a sufficient clamor from the people, a “single payer system” will perhaps be introduced, as a way to obtain what has been the Holy Grail to liberals for decades, socialized medicine paid for by our government directly, no middle man.

I believe it. Good for those guys. Don’t give or sell it to the feds. Keep this thing inoperable.

Ehealthinsurance.com already existed with insurance plans available at a variety of price points and ranges of coverage for each state. HHS could have bought them out. We had to buy in the private market last year and found it useful.

According to the GAO, the cost of the Obamacare website was close to $400 million.
Bloomberg Government analyst Peter Gosselin released a report last Thursday that puts
the cost for the website at closer to $1 billion. Mr. Gosselin stated that the GAO study was
too narrowly focused, and that he had expanded his search of the federal contracts database
to include all contracts involving the Affordable Care Act. The result was that “… in
looking at the full range of contracts for just ten firms, the Bloomberg Government analysis
found more than $1 billion in contract awards”.

What kind of budget did these three guys have?
_____________
On a slightly off-topic but interesting note, about three weeks ago the House Energy and
Commerce Committee held hearings over the Obamacare website. According to theWashington Post, representatives of website contractors admitted under questioning
that the website is not compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act, and that that non-compliance was per this administration’s specs for the website. HIPPA
is the law that protects the privacy of electronically transmitted medical records. Basically,
it’s come out in the hearings that one’s medical history, which one must enter into the Obama-
care website to proceed to the purchase of insurance, is not protected from datamining by
third parties. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy from the website at this time.

It is generally true in the IT world that small teams of talented and motivated individuals are the way to go and are much more effective than larger teams. There was a book written some time ago called “the Mythical Man-Month” about this. Software development more resembles a surgical team doing an operation, you wouldn’t assign 6 surgeons and expect the operation to get done in 1/6th the time but that often happens in the software world. One axiom mentioned in Mythical Man-Month is adding people to a late software project makes it get done later not earlier. You end up spending more time coordinating with people that you do getting real work done.

The Apple MacIntosh was totally designed (hardware and software) by a team of about 20 people, in a “skunk works” where they operated more or less independently of the company hierarchy. Look what they were able to accomplish.

From a tech standpoint there is no reason why the project couldn’t have been designed to use small groups to produce modules.

A few months ago one of my former theology students who is now a canon lawyer told of me of the problems within the code. I replied that the code is merely a reflection of theology. If there are inconsistencies in the code, it’s because they exist in the Vat II theology that it attempts to codify.

I suspect that it’s the same with the Obamacare website. Probably, those who wrote the law and regs didn’t think it through well enough to produce something cohesive enough that it could be broken down into modules. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were comments by the designers that the project was a mess. Good IT design depends on good communication with the users (in this case, whoever at HHS was in charge of the project). My guess is that the size of the contract combined with various less than competent HHS managers (incl the likely presence of political appointees) was an impediment to communication.

When you shop…

... through Amazon, please, come here first? Enter Amazon through my search box. I'll then get a small percentage of everything you buy. (Pssst - Can't see the search box? Turn off your "ad-blocker" for this site!)

My wish lists

The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD.

- Proverbs 21:31

Support them with prayer and fasting.

CLICK to buy Car Magnets & Stickers

Aedificantium enim unusquisque gladio erat accinctus.

- Nehemiah 4:18

"Let God arise! Let His enemies be scattered! Let those who hate him flee before His Holy Face!"

CLICK and say your Daily Offering!

Let us pray…

Grant unto thy Church, we beseech
Thee, O merciful God, that She, being
gathered together by the Holy Ghost, may
be in no wise troubled by attack from her
foes.
O God, who by sin art offended and by
penance pacified, mercifully regard the
prayers of Thy people making supplication
unto Thee,and turn away the scourges of
Thine anger which we deserve for our sins.
Almighty and Everlasting God, in
whose Hand are the power and the
government of every realm: look down upon
and help the Christian people that the heathen
nations who trust in the fierceness of their
own might may be crushed by the power of
thine Arm. Through our Lord Jesus Christ,
Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee
in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world
without end. R. Amen.

An outstanding opportunity to get into Latin and New Testament Greek

For Easter: another ethereal music CD from the chart-topping nuns…

Yes, Fr. Z is taking ads…

... and there will be nearly 1,000,000 page loads this month.

A bit more food for thought…

“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

- Basil of Caesarea - ep. 243

Help Monks in Wyoming, Fr. Z, and get great coffee too!

And they have tea too!

Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

PLEASE RESPOND. Pretty pleeeease?

Should the US Bishops have us return to obligatory "meatless Fridays" during the whole year and not just during Lent?

Because you don’t know when you are going to need to move fast or get along without the supermarket…

For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

Identity theft is a serious problem that you do NOT want to have. I use Lifelock.

And for your cybersecurity…

Wyoming Catholic College!

A great place in Rome…

More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Check out the Cardinal Newman Society feed!

Be a “Zed-Head”!

Fr. Z’s stuff is everywhere

More food for thought…

"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."

- Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176

Even More Food For Thought

"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Fathers, you don’t know who might show up! It could be a “big fish” of one sort or other…

And... GO TO CONFESSION!

Leave Voice Mail for Fr. Z

Nota bene: I do not answer these numbers or this Skype address. You won't get me "live". I check for messages regularly.

Help the Sisters. They have a building project. Get great soap (gifts, etc.) while helping REAL nuns!

Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Archives

ENTRY CALENDAR

Do you use my blog often? Is it helpful to you?

If so, please consider subscribing to send a monthly donation. That way I have steady income I can plan on, and you wind up regularly on my list of benefactors for whom I pray and for whom I periodically say Holy Mass.

Some options

The opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect the positions of any of the Church's entities with which I am involved. They are my own.